dulce et decorum est
by 1848
Summary: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. How sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country.


**dulce et decorum est**

I. _pro patria mori._

i. _horace's ode_  
Stripped of her modesty and (preferably) in the early hours fore Helios's complexion bled through and ruptured the night with internal bleeding, she counts her lovers, her courters, her fleeting moments of passion  
But (and it's a monumental exception)  
she loves only one. She has devoted her, her entire? meagre? insubstantial? pivotal? complete? being? soul? idea? body? mind?  
everything  
_anything_  
everything to him.  
(she has forsaken her gods, renounced her ideals, waived her security)

When she had felt him, when she had _known_, she whispered to the atrophic oak in fragments that the little heartbeat inside was greater than herself, who was only an idea that Macedonia had worshipped; that she would carve out Rome's liver, slit Aegyptus' throat, tear the Magyars and Huns, crush the backward Vandals and Visigoths, fucking castrate that Turk if she needed to.  
She could - and would be - the Mediterranean's seething underbelly.

And so she stood in Constantinople, [**fourteen-fifty-three**], with the same doctrine, staring down the Muslim heathen from across the Mediterranean.

Alcmene had pressed kisses to Heracles's forehead hours earlier, had known she was old and almost gone. And Heracles had been frightened when he brushed her hand; a withered onion; had felt small when he remembered it young and smooth. Had been consumed by nausea and dizziness when she placed him in the altar of Hagia Sophia; he - and she - they had felt slightly skewered, out of place, were pagans in the decadent ornamental church.

The Ottoman Empire gallantly strode towards her, arms stretched to embrace the glory and gold, and perhaps god. He had called her 'The End of Rome', and with good reason.

She had, with a weary eye, denounced the hubris-stricken youth.

"I wonder where we go in our deaths," he asked, a wolf in golden-threaded robes, scent hidden among humans, philandering in musk.

"We don't," she said. "We harbour ideas. We are but vessels. Don't hold yourself under a false banner."

(It was unfortunate. Weren't they, if not friends, if not foes, weren't they) - at some lapse before - at some spasm in their past - (at least ..consorts?)

The Ottoman Empire had (an almost scrotal) stirring when he saw how old (aged, decrepit) she had let herself become; had, too, remembered her young and rich and absolute. The Golden Age always preceded the fall; so it had been with China and Rome, and so it would be with her.

"You intend to siege Constantinople," she accused through bitten teeth, "to rape and pillage, and steal away your godforsaken spoils of war."

"Only if you make me."

"I yield to no one. Not to man, not to God, not to you."

He laughed morosely. It fell like a moonlit howl, coat clung with ice.

"I bow to no one," she barked.

"We have more in common than you realize."

Her rosey toes flexed at that, "Don't call the urge to survive common. Of course it's common; common even in the vulgarity and troves of the ignominious. Don't elevate something so banal to a status worthy of kinship."

He shrugged, "With truth, I will have conquered the universe while living."

And there it was.

And there they went.

And there she fell.

Had melted to ash and flown away like a carousel of moths, and the Ottoman Empire watched (without making a sound) for several plucked at his lips and kissed the cusps of his fabric's folds. He set off towards the Hagia Sophia to find the little boy, because he had seen Alcmene bore him, back when the bitch was in labour, when she had hidden the tiny thing from Rome.

It had rackled him, her - was it fear? silent defiance? affront? - to Rome. It had offended him that she was cautious, perturbed that her own may very well have been a bastard child.

"He doesn't look like Rome," she had suggested; and the magnitude of her accusation, so fretted with unease, hissed at his ears. "Rome doesn't have green eyes. I don't even have his eyes."

He hadn't noticed that her stares were interrogations on their own.

"You don't even have his eyes," she said, wringing her hands on her toga.

"Well, he's... beautiful. Like you, I guess," he had said dryly; had not known what to say; had turned to look the other direction, not wanting to see her (it didn't do much good, he still felt her beseeching eyes on the crook of his neck); had took off his plumes and feathers in domestic courtesy, feeling too naked with the mask, feeling too sober.

And she had choked in a brutal laugh.

He had whipped back in curiousity.

"He's got that dumb curl of yours," first. And then, "You'd better leave if you're a coward."

He had made the motion to move, for what was he but a battle-shy youth, hardy with experience only with blood and steel, not flesh and adulation. He had absconded and deserted his heart with the corpses on the battlefield

(unlike Orpheus).

"Death pursues the man who flees, spares not the hamstrings or cowardly backs of battle-shy youths," she recited as the weight on the bed lifted.

He paused at the portal, gloved hand on the frame, "Man is stronger than steel, harder than iron, fragile as a rose. I'm not Rome. I fucking hate kids."

She had watched him leave. Had bitten her lip when she blasphemed his name in desperation; had cried when the supplication fell between four walls.

Heracles - no, **Greece**. Greece was standing there (had been standing there for three days) when he thrust open the doors. With electric clarity, Greece was certain his mother had passed, and that This Old Bastard (who stood heinously to hide Helios's complexion and rosy-fingered Dawn) was the root of it.

With his troops carousing and devouring their greed of wanton flesh and petty silver, the Ottoman Empire was heralded by Greece's Latin, "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori!"

How sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country.

"Look, just," he breathed through his nose. "Just relent, kid, and this'll be easy for both of us." (And he had been right, the fucking bastard was a gorgeous child - if not a straight-up fucking retarded one.)  
Greece stiffened, "A country up to her neck in a fight. Did she look and call for you?"  
He hid behind his mask.  
"Every one of her sons must hear and none that hears it dare forget."

The trail and journey to Greece's new 'home' was sodden red with the wreck of a broken city and a regiment blinded with dust and smoke.

With raw feet and acerbic savagery, Greece bitterly stained the linen (the pottery, the sculptures) in Turkey's room. And **Turkey**, in turn, had nearly thrashed him to death  
(_"A broken bone for every piece of porcelain."_)  
when Greece refused to kneel before the Sultan.

When Turkey had demanded an explanation, Greece's tiny skull in the palm of his right hand, on the cusp of being fucking crushed against the pretty tessellated tiles of the bathroom (to shatter like a pretty vase), he had bellowed,

feral and barbaric,

"I bow to no one."

Like (father) mother, like son.


End file.
